However, leaving aside all mere speculation about the future, we must face a
very serious question about the Web and the tech it involves. The TAZ
desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as
immediate. The very essence of the affair is "breast-to-breast" as the sufis
say, or face-to-face. But, BUT: the very essence of the Web is mediation.
Machines here are our ambassadors--the flesh is irrelevant except as a
terminal, with all the sinister connotations of the term.
The TAZ may perhaps best find its own space by wrapping its head around two
seemingly contradictory attitudes toward Hi- Tech and its apotheosis the
Net: (1) what we might call the Fifth Estate/Neo-Paleolithic Post-Situ
Ultra-Green position, which construes itself as a luddite argument against
mediation and against the Net; and (2) the Cyberpunk utopianists,
futuro-libertarians, Reality Hackers and their allies who see the Net as a
step forward in evolution, and who assume that any possible ill effects of
mediation can be overcome--at least, once we've liberated the means of
production.
The TAZ agrees with the hackers because it wants to come into being--in
part--through the Net, even through the mediation of the Net. But it also
agrees with the greens because it retains intense awareness of itself as
body and feels only revulsion for CyberGnosis, the attempt to transcend the
body through instantaneity and simulation. The TAZ tends to view the
Tech/anti-Tech dichotomy as misleading, like most dichotomies, in which
apparent opposites turn out to be falsifications or even hallucinations
caused by semantics. This is a way of saying that the TAZ wants to live in
this world, not in the idea of another world, some visionary world born of
false unification (all green OR all metal) which can only be more pie in the
sky by-&-by (or as Alice put it, "Jam yesterday or jam tomorrow, but never
jam today").

What meaning does this have for the hypertextual author? Hypertext, Stuart Molthrop argues, has the potential to be rhizomatic but fails; while it is a non-linear format, it does not escape logocentrism. With all due respect to Molthrop's argument, the purpose of the TAZ is to maintain freedom within a larger, Statist/archist society. Hypertext--or any other form of textual (or even speech-based) intercourse--cannot liberate people from the supposed logocentric tyrrany of alphanumeric thought. It should not be expected to.

Instead, hypertext should be taken for what it is: anarchist writing. The word "anarchist" is used advisedly, and here does not have the political meaning it generally represents. "Rhizomatic" almost suffices; where the traditional narrative is a line or tree, hypertext is a web. Hypertextual systems like the World-wide Web resemble Deleuze and Guattari's perfect book:
The ideal book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations...

Hypertext is headless literature. It has no natural hierarchy, not even that imposed by linear reading; as in Maggie Skodon's "Rhizome," it can even lack something as simple as an orderly progression from lexia to lexia. J. Yellowlees Douglas and Michael Joyce note the lack of formal closure. Hypertext is text with some or all of the rules taken away. It might not change the world, it can certainly change literature. Collage allowed the SI (among many, many others) to create subversive art out of the State's detrius; hypertext seems uniquely positioned to do the same. Appropriate, mutate, regurgitate, reiterate. Even nomads speak, shouting poetry in the shadow of Babylon...